Raga-delic roundabout

>> DJ Cheb i Sabbah, the anti-fusion fusionist

By RUPERT BOTTENBERG

What goes around comes around. In the case of DJ Cheb i Sabbah, things have really come full circle. Back in the '60s, Algerian-born Cheb was spinning soul 45s in Parisian nightclubs. His circular path took him to the world of avant-garde theatre, management for Don Cherry (no, hockey puck, the trumpet player with the worldbeat bent), extensive show promotion ("I did 33 concerts in five years--with a credit card," he says) and record production for the Sub Rosa and Asphodel labels, before depositing him back at Square One--only on Level Two.

These days Cheb has little time to oil the gears for other artists. He's too busy recording and touring as a DJ. It ain't Stax and Motown fattening his record bag, though. His game is taking venerated classical music, from India and elsewhere, and making it jive for the modern club kid on the dancefloor.

"As a DJ," he tells me from his homebase of San Francisco, "with the kind of music I play, I put more of an emphasis on intros and outros, as opposed to beats, matching bpm. What I spin is not dance music in the sense that most dance music has no lyrics, and is not composed as a song, with a beginning, middle and end. But I've chosen to play the other kind of music, which are songs, with a different kind of segue, and presenting them in dance form, no blank space and all that. So intros and outros, that's where the cut-up technique works."

The cut-up technique Cheb refers to is that conceived by Beat writer Brion Gysin, an associate of William S. Burroughs, who also used cut-up. The idea is taking an original work, chopping it to pieces and reassembling it in a frequently random fashion. In other words, the dawn of the remix. "It's something I've applied to music, and it opened doors for me. Psychic TV did the same thing, to an extent. So that's what we got from him, mixing elements to produce magic. It's always surprising how it works."

The raw stuff

Cheb says he was pleasantly surprised when the DATs came back, after he announced his intention to do a remix disc of the tracks on Shri Durga, his debut on the Six Degrees label. A half-dozen names from the Asian breakbeat and world-tronic scenes, such as State of Bengal, Fun Da Mental and bhangra booster Bally Sagoo, had their way with Cheb's material on the recently-released Maha Maya.

What should be pointed out about Shri Durga is that, despite an undercoat of carefully layered beats, it is essentially an album of fully-formed Hindustani ragas, for which Cheb enlisted several prominent Indian classical musicians. "I wanted it to be organic and traditional enough that you really hear these instruments, not just a five-second sample repeated. If you hear the sarod and sarangi, and you like it, you'll go looking for the original stuff without the beats."

Cheb is a valiant de-fender of the "original stuff," making him something of an anomaly in these zany, postmodern times--particularly given his job description. Raised on north African classical music, he branched out in the mid-'60s to chakra-realignin' Indian stuff, like dhrupad legends the Dagar Brothers, as well as Tibetan chants and such. He worries that such material may be on the endangered list.

"I think the fusion can be left for the fusionists. For me, what's important is that the traditional schools continue. You can't just fuse the modern, you have to have the other stuff. But who's going to teach the classical stuff? In India, they have garanas, which are the different schools. You might think they're all uptight, because they don't approve of fusion and experiments, but at the same time they're giving something invaluable, because without them, what would you fuse with? You have to respect the people who hold on to tradition, and pass it on to someone with the determination and skill to pass it on again."

But what about Cheb's own roots, the classical stylings of Algeria and Morocco? "That will be next year," he says. "I've started that, but the next record won't be north African, it will be south Asian again. Still Indian, still Hindustani, like Shri Durga, but also carnatic, which is from the south. I hope it's successful--to some people it might sound the same, but it's actually very different. It's based on secular ragas but the style is lighter, and it's with words, devotional poetry, by poets who wrote in a language that everyone could understand. It was for everybody, for the common people." :

With DJ Ram and Gordon Fields at Jingxi on Sunday, March 26, 10pm, $8